Just Keep Dancing!

And thus you will dance to your death here, on this hilltop, at the end of the day. And in your last dance you will tell of your struggle, of the battles you have won and of those you have lost; you will tell of your joys and bewilderments upon encountering personal power. Your dance will tell about the secrets and about the marvels you have stored. And your death will sit here and watch you. The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness. – Journey to Ixtlan

To me keep dancing means dancing along all the lines of awareness that come into my periphery. When we dance with this perception, if we do not resonate with a particular line or if it depletes our energy, we can discontinue that particular dance. Sometimes, the story that has culminated into a specific line of awareness may bring us great joy so we dance along that line for a long time, maybe a lifetime, or for just a while until we’ve attained the knowledge the line offers or until it becomes worn out or draining. On the other hand, if we do not resonate with a particular line of awareness we can reject it immediately or we may sometimes find ourselves dancing to the end of it anyway, in order to come into a deeper understanding of why that line of awareness even exists. And we may discover that some of those lines are very, very dark. When we dance upon all the lines of awareness we get to see the entire mold of man. The mold of man, as described by don Juan, is not a creator, but the pattern of every human attribute we can think of and some we cannot even conceive.

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no points to defend

The characteristic of miserable seers is that they are willing to forget the wonder of the world. They become overwhelmed by the fact that they see and believe that it’s their genius that counts. A seer must be a paragon in order to override the nearly invincible laxness of our human condition. More important than seeing itself is what seers do with what they see. ~ Don Juan, The Fire from Within

Warriors marvel at the wonder of the world. They marvel at the beauty and they marvel at the insanity. They do what they do for the love of doing it. They cry, they laugh, they know compassion, forgiveness, love, wonder, awe, fear, and sadness. They sense with every ounce of their being every single sensation or feeling that arises. It is all of these wonders and feelings that bring total awareness to a warrior. To deny yourself of that which arises is avoidance; to become attached to it is foolishness.

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spiritual elders – the true dreamers

Now that you’ve met the medicine man you know there is nothing I can teach you. ~ Wanagi Hokshila, Oglala Sioux Holy Man

© Elenaray

The wisdom elders of our society are those who, in their youth, were just like us. They were warriors of freedom seeking vision and guidance from an unnatural existence rooted in greed and power. They danced, and drummed, and chanted, and sweat, and quested, and journeyed, and explored. They questioned the answers, tested everything, rejected certain things and followed their own vision of truth and beauty.

Like many other people, as a young woman I sought out elders and wisdom teachers who could help me to understand the mysteries of life so I could find the answers to the questions I had. Some of the teachers I met were charlatans, nothing more than self-important imposters claiming to hold the keys to the kingdom. As an intuitive I quickly walked away from these self-proclaimed gurus. I have been blessed to find a few real teachers, elders who have been committed to spirit from an early age, just as I had been. Continue reading

Artificial Intelligence

There is no doubt that the description we have received (of living in the world)  is a valuable possession, similar to the rigid stake that is tied to a tender sapling to strengthen and guide it. It allows us to grow up as normal people, within a society that is molded to that rigidity. To achieve it, we had to learn how to ‘skim’ – that is, how to make selective readings from the enormous volume of data that arrives to our senses. But once those readings are converted into ‘reality’, the rigidity of our attention works as an anchor, because it prevents us from becoming aware of our incredible possibilities. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

I’ve been thinking lately about artificial intelligence and how our species is rapidly evolving into the arena of exactly that. Most people are “skimmers”, merely touching the surface of a subject in order to accumulate meaning and knowledge. Yes, as you know this is nothing more than self-importance, nothing more than accumulating knowledge to claim to know things without really knowing anything.

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Perception

The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness can be a single, functional, inextricable unit with two domains. The first one is the attention of the tonal; that is to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place their awareness on the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of power; our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart order to our perception of our daily world. ~ don Juan, The Second Ring of Power

I once read a quote that said “there is no truth, there is only perception” yet so many people hunger for the truth. They sit around and wait for a truth to be declared and when it is they either buy into it or reject it. Stopping the internal dialogue is the key to the sorcerers’ world, the mystery. The mystery, or the secret of the sorcerers’ explanation is that it deals with unfolding the wings of perception. The nagual by itself is of no use, it has to be tempered by the tonal. The sorcerers’ secret in using the nagual is in our perception.

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